Dropbox's Carousel app now frees up phone storage for you

Dropbox's Carousel organizes your lifelong memories in one app

It's not every day that a company shows off literal vacation slides as part of a press event, but Dropbox did it today as a way to introduce Carousel. It's an app for both iOS and Android that takes your photos from your Dropbox account and organizes them by time, date and event, and any new photos that you take on your phone will automatically backup to the cloud. You'll also be able to not only share all of your precious memories with family and friends, those same people can return the favor and share some of their pics and vids so you can add it to your personal deck of digital slides. The new app will be available on both platforms today for free. When we asked company reps about desktop and other mobile platforms, we were told that Dropbox is a multi-platform service, hinting that we can expect expansion further down the road without actually giving a specific time frame.

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The new app is a refreshing contrast to the experience one has when viewing the same photos and videos directly on the official Dropbox app; this is much more fluid, fast and easy to manage. If you want to scroll back to the beginning of your photo stream -- say, if you've added your vacation slides from 1991 -- you can use a slider at the bottom of the screen to quickly jump back.

You'll be able to view your photos and videos from both Dropbox and your local device storage, but as you'd expect from a cloud storage service, those memories that are stored in the cloud will remain there, and won't take up any additional space on your phone or tablet.

In addition to the standard sharing options, you can also have actual conversations with the people you're sharing all of this stuff with; for those of you rely heavily on sending picture messages back and forth with your friends and family (and you aren't using Instagram exclusively? What?), this means that Dropbox now offers a viable messaging alternative to the gazillions of other chat-only apps out there. All told, our first impressions were rather enjoyable, but you should be able to try it out for yourself sometime today.